General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

So Young (致我们终将逝去的青春)

So Young (致我们终将逝去的青春, literally "To Our Youth That Is Fading Away"; often shortened to 致青春) is a 2013 Chinese youth romance drama directed by Zhao Wei in her directorial debut, adapted from Xin Yiwu's (辛夷坞) best-selling novel of the same title, with a screenplay by Li Qiang (李樯) and Stanley Kwan (关锦鹏) as producer¹. It was also Zhao Wei's graduation work for the directing program of the Beijing Film Academy². Released in mainland China on April 26, 2013, it earned 46.5 million yuan on its first day, a record opening for a 2D Chinese-language film, and finished with a mainland total of about 720 million yuan³. The film is widely credited with setting the template for the wave of Chinese campus youth films that followed⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director / debut	Zhao Wei's first feature and her Beijing Film Academy directing-program graduation work²
Source	Adapted from Xin Yiwu's novel of the same title; screenplay by Li Qiang; produced by Stanley Kwan¹
Release	April 26, 2013, mainland China; 131 minutes; Mandarin⁵
Box office	Opening day 46.5 million yuan (then a 2D Chinese-language record); mainland total about 720 million yuan; worldwide gross $114.9 million³^•⁵
Principal cast	Yang Zishan (Zheng Wei), Mark Chao (Chen Xiaozheng), Han Geng (Lin Jing), Jiang Shuying (Ruan Guan)⁶
Awards	Golden Rooster Award for Best Directorial Debut (2013); Shanghai Film Critics Award for Best New Director; three Golden Horse Award nominations⁷^•⁸
Novel sales	Over 1.5 million copies before the film; roughly 300,000 to 400,000 more sold during the film's theatrical run³

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film follows Zheng Wei (杨子姗), an 18-year-old freshman who arrives at university expecting friendship and love, pursues the serious engineering student Chen Xiaozheng (赵又廷), and after graduation is forced to choose when her former lovers Lin Jing (韩庚) and Chen both return to her life a decade later¹³. The story is set against campus life in the late 1990s and early 2000s: a Douban review describes the setting as university life from 1998 to 2003, before the information explosion, with pagers, portable cassette players, and the employment pressures introduced by the expansion of university enrollment¹⁴. A pager mentioned by a professor on screen serves as a period marker, placing the student characters among those born in the late 1970s and early 1980s¹⁵.

Critics read the film as a narrative of youth already lost rather than youth lived. The critic Zhou Xuehua described its theme as a collective memory and mourning of youth, and noted Zhao Wei's own phrase for youth, a "shining wound"¹⁶. The same review highlights the contrast between the bold, headstrong Zheng Wei and the gentle, classical beauty Ruan Guan, whose death in a traffic accident on the way to meet a former boyfriend marks, in that reading, the end of the older feminine ideal¹⁶. The film ends without resolution, with Zheng Wei and Chen Xiaozheng seated side by side at the aquarium where they once met¹⁶.

From novel to film

The novel's author Xin Yiwu, whose real name is Jiang Chunling (蒋春玲), was born in 1981 in Nanning, Guangxi⁹. In 2010 her agent recommended the book to the screenwriter Li Qiang, who passed it to Zhao Wei, then preparing her graduation project at the Beijing Film Academy's directing program. Li Qiang adapted it into a screenplay; after more than two years of preparation, filming began in 2012 and the film opened a year later³. Zhao Wei has said she and Li Qiang had been looking for a suitable subject for her first film until she read the novel¹⁰.

Production took visible care with period detail. Zhao Wei said many locations from a decade or more earlier could no longer be found intact, so sets including the dormitory, the graduation farewell dinner, and a supermarket scene were built from her team's own design drawings, and she covered budget overruns herself¹¹. The Osaka Asian Film Festival program notes that the film is also informed by the director's own experience as a college student in the 1990s¹².

Box office and commercial impact

The release was a commercial event. The opening day's 46.5 million yuan surpassed the 35 million yuan first day of Lost in Thailand and set a new first-day record for a 2D Chinese-language film; three days passed 140 million yuan¹⁷. Enlight Pictures, the investor and distributor, announced on May 8, 2013 that after 12 days the mainland gross had exceeded 520 million yuan, more than half the company's audited revenue for the previous fiscal year¹⁸. Sixteen days in, the total passed 600 million yuan, briefly placing the film 14th in mainland box-office history at that time¹. The final mainland total was about 720 million yuan, third highest of 2013⁴, and Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of $114.9 million against a budget IMDb lists as an estimated CN¥20,000,000⁵. (The Paper describes the production as a 60-million-yuan small-budget film; the two budget figures differ and no reconciled figure is available⁴.)

The film's success lifted its producers' share prices and, together with American Dreams in China and the Tiny Times films, ignited the 2013 youth-film boom in the domestic market¹⁹^•². It also drove book sales: the novel, already past 1.5 million copies, sold an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 additional copies during the film's run³.

Publication dispute

On May 1, 2013, two print versions of the story appeared on the same day: the novel reissued by Baihuazhou Literature and Art Publishing House as a film commemorative edition, and a separate book of Li Qiang's screenplay published by Beijing United Publishing under the slogan of "rebuilding 'So Young'". Media reports said the screenplay's publication had not been authorized by Xin Yiwu; her agent stated that she had licensed only the film-adaptation rights of the novel and that the contract said nothing about whether an adapted screenplay could be published²⁰.

Reception and honors

The film screened in the World Focus section of the 26th Tokyo International Film Festival, the Love section of the 57th BFI London Film Festival, and festivals in Leiden and Stockholm²¹. Zhao Wei won the Golden Rooster Award for Best Directorial Debut and the Shanghai Film Critics Award for Best New Director in 2013, and the film was nominated for the Golden Horse Awards for Best New Director, Best Art Design, and Best Original Film Song⁷^•⁸. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 61% Tomatometer from a small number of reviews, with an audience rating of 3.3 out of 5²².

Commentary was not uniformly positive. Reviewers noted a shift in pacing and visual texture after the campus section, attributing the difference to the move from collective campus life to individual lives after graduation¹⁶. The same review criticized the predominantly gray, dim lighting and color palette chosen for the nostalgic tone¹⁶.

Other adaptations and legacy

The property extended beyond the film. A stage play adaptation, directed by He Nian with a script by Guan Bo and Gan Lu as Zheng Wei, entered rehearsal in December 2013 for performance at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing²³. A television series version began production in 2015, expanding the roughly 200,000-character novel into a script of more than 600,000 characters, with about 15 episodes on campus life and 25 on the characters' working lives afterward²⁴. A second film drawn from Xin Yiwu's related novel, So Young: Never Gone (致青春·原来你还在这里), starring Liu Yifei and Wu Yifan, was released in 2016 and grossed 336 million yuan³^•²⁵.

As a cultural marker, the film is treated in Chinese film studies as the work that established the commercial campus-youth formula for the following three years⁴. A comparative study of Chinese and Korean nostalgia cinema places it, alongside the Korean Architecture 101, among works that fix youth in the everyday campus life of the 1990s city rather than in stories tying youth to larger social change²⁶.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2010 onward

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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